Scotland is set to vote Thursday on whether to become independent from Britain for the first time since 1707. The question on the ballot will ask simply: "Should Scotland be an independent country?" Polls show the referendum is too close to call, but many British politicians fear voters will choose independence. On Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron warned voters that separation would be a "painful divorce." We...

Tony Benn, the former British Cabinet minister, longtime Parliament member and antiwar activist, has died at the age of 88. He was the longest-serving member of Parliament in the history of Britain’s Labour Party, serving more than half a century. He left Parliament in 2001, saying he planned to "spend more time on politics." In 2009 he appeared on Democracy Now! to talk about the war in Afghanistan and Britain’s fight...

Amidst a global media frenzy, Prince William and Kate Middleton welcomed a baby boy into the world Monday in London, England. The lead up to the royal birth generated a carnival of nonstop media coverage for several weeks. Photographers from across the globe braved a record heat wave to camp outside St. Mary’s Hospital awaiting news. International TV crews from around the world broadcasted frequent, frenzied speculations on everything from the...

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has died at the age of 87. Thatcher was Britain’s first female prime minister, serving three terms in office. Known as the "Iron Lady," Thatcher became synonymous with austerity economics as a close ally of President Ronald Reagan. She famously declared to critics of neoliberal capitalism that "there is no alternative." Her long-running battle with striking British...

A major media scandal has toppled the head of the BBC over the network’s handling of two reports on sex abuse, wrongly implicating a politician in one, and killing a report on its own popular BBC host, the late Jimmy Savile. One year after his death, Savile has been accused of abusing potentially hundreds of victims, while the BBC stayed silent. We’re joined by three guests: Lark Turner, who has been researching and writing about...

Shortly before Julian Assange spoke on Sunday, a number of his supporters spoke outside the Ecuadorean embassy. Speakers included writer and activist Tariq Ali, as well as Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murray, a whistleblower himself, was removed from office in 2004 after he exposed how the United States and Britain supported torture by the Uzbek regime. "The fact that [British Foreign Secretary] William Hague...

Unrest continues to spread across England after protests erupted Saturday in London when police shot to death Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man. Mobs firebombed police stations and set shops on fire in London, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Nottingham and Birmingham. After waiting for several days, Prime Minister David Cameron has cut short his vacation and recalled Parliament from summer recess. Scotland Yard has ordered its officers to...

The British phone-hacking scandal engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has crossed the Atlantic and could impact his maze of interests in the United States. The watchdog group, ProtectOurElections.org, has called on the FBI and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch criminal and civil investigations into possible prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the wake of the scandal that began in the United Kingdom....

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is engulfed in a growing scandal after new evidence emerged that his reporters in Britain paid corrupt police officers for story tips and hacked the voicemails of thousands of people, from child murder victims to the families of Britain’s war dead. On Thursday, Murdoch shocked the country by shutting down the newspaper at the center of the scandal, the News of the World, Britain’s biggest-selling...

In one of his first public events since being held under house arrest, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared in London Saturday for a conversation with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, moderated by Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. They discuss the impact of WikiLeaks on world politics, the release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and Cablegate—the largest trove of classified U.S. government records in history. “From being inside the...